


Frequent Kidnapping

by enchantedsleeper



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Brain-bot cookies, Gen, Megamind reads 1800s bodice-rippers, Snappy the Alligator, Spinning Blade of Doom (evil patent pending)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 08:58:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6278014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enchantedsleeper/pseuds/enchantedsleeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Can someone please stamp my Frequent Kidnapping Card?" This is the story of Roxanne's thirty-second through forty-first kidnappings, also known as the story of how she got her Frequent Kidnapping Card.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frequent Kidnapping

By Roxanne’s count, it is the thirty-second time that she has been kidnapped by Megamind and taken into the bowels of his evil lair. Even after thirty-two kidnappings, she still screams the minute she regains consciousness and the bag is removed from her head, but it’s a scream of rage and frustration, not fear.

She distantly hears Megamind say, “Miss Ritchi. We meet again,” in that infuriating way he has of trying to pretend her presence in his lair is a complete surprise, rather than a carefully orchestrated attempt to lure Metro Man into rescuing her and placing himself in the path of whatever elaborately conceived trap Megamind has designed this time. She is having none of it.

“I was in the **middle** of an **interview** ,” she rages at him once she has regained her breath, her face flushed. “On **live television**. Does the word ‘subtlety’ mean **anything** to you?!”

Judging by the blank look on Megamind’s face, it actually doesn’t. Luckily, Minion is fluent in Megamind and is on hand to translate as always.

“Sub-tle-ty,” he tells Megamind, pronouncing the silent ‘b’. Understanding dawns on Megamind’s face. “You looked it up in the dictionary last week. I tried to tell you that the ‘b’ is silent.”

Megamind looks highly affronted. “I am **extremely** sub-tle!” he declares, still mispronouncing the word. “I had Minion drive past in the invisible car and render you unconscious with my new Chloroform Aerosol.” Minion holds up a spray can with a blue nozzle and has the good grace to look sheepish. “To all watching, it would simply appear as though you succumbed to a fit of the vapours. I have learned that women are prone to those.”

Roxanne flexes her fingers behind her back, itching with the urge to slap the smug look off his face. “Megamind, this is the twenty-first **century** , not an eighteen-hundreds bodice ripper. Yes, I know you read those,” she adds as Megamind’s blue skin flushes rosy pink. “Minion showed me your collection last time while you and Metro Man were busy trading witticisms.”

“ **Minion**!” Megamind spins around in his supervillain desk chair and pins his sidekick with a scandalised and infuriated glare. Then he swings back to look at Roxanne. “I- I will have you know that those are extremely rare first editions!”

“They’re still two centuries out of date. Women don’t wear corsets any more, Megamind.” Roxanne can’t believe she’s even having this conversation, but _someone_ clearly needs to bring the man up to date, especially if he’s going to be inflicting his misguided ideas about gender roles on _her_. “Oh, yeah, and we also have **jobs** which are **important** , jobs which involve **interviews** that took **weeks** to arrange and don’t need an egomaniac supervillain **ruining** them while he acts out petty **revenge fantasies**!”

Roxanne is breathing hard again as she finishes her rant, and both Minion and Megamind back away in the face of her anger, Megamind wheeling backwards in the chair and bumping up against the console behind him. She slumps back against the wooden chair, her shoulders aching with the strain of having her hands pulled behind her. “Is there no-one else in the city you could kidnap? For the sake of variety? You know that Metro Man will rescue whoever it is.”

Megamind spins his chair around so that the back is to Roxanne, pressing buttons on the console which she is fairly sure are just there for show. “My calculations have indicated that Megamind’s response time is five point seven percent swifter when you are kidnapped and not an ordinary citizen,” he reels off.

Roxanne wonders what she’s supposed to be, if not an ordinary citizen.

“What calcula-” Minion begins, and is silenced by another one of Megamind’s infuriated glares. “Oh yes. Right. Those.”

Roxanne tries to stretch her arms out a little and rolls her neck, staring up and around at the dark walls and blinking gadgets that are sadly more familiar to her than the new apartment she just moved into. “I think I deserve a medal for putting up with this,” she grumbles, mostly to herself. “Or at the very least some kind of recognition.”

For a split second, she could swear that Megamind looks pensive, before his hand abruptly slams down on a lever and the floor splits beneath her to reveal a pool of water filled with snapping green jaws. “Enough talking!” he declares. “Let’s see how long your bravado will last in the face of my alligator pit! You’ll be **begging** Metro Man to save you before the hour is out!”

Roxanne is mostly unafraid of Megamind’s alligators, which have been a fixture in the lair ever since Kidnapping Number Seven, but she still inches her feet up a little to make sure they’re out of range of the teeth. “Hey there, Snappy,” she calls down at the water, pretending to address one of the aligators, though in spite of how often she’s had them circling beneath her feet, she can’t tell them apart yet. “Is he feeding you properly? I hope you’re feeding them properly,” Roxanne tells Megamind, lifting her head to nail him in the eye with a steely glare. “Don’t make me call the Metro City Animal Welfare Hotline on you once I get out of here.”

Megamind blinks at her, wrong-footed by her continued lack of terror, and Roxanne barely resists the urge to groan with frustration. For all his astronomically high I.Q., Megamind is incredibly slow in grasping basic ideas like “if you continually threaten someone but fail to deliver on those threats, eventually, they stop being threats” or “a supervillain without a basic grasp of pronunciation is not that intimidating”. She would almost feel sorry for him, except for the fact that yet again, he’d unceremoniously yanked her out of doing something important, just for the sake of furthering his own selfish goals.

“Minion,” Megamind tries to whisper, but his voice carries clearly across the room to her. “Why isn’t she begging Metro Man to save her?”

“Perhaps you should escalate the threat level, sir,” suggests Minion, and Roxanne really does groan this time. “Might I suggest the flamethrower?”

“Oh, god, _not_ the flamethrower,” says Roxanne in exasperation. Megamind has only threatened her with it once before, but the resulting singeing to her hair had taken multiple hairdresser’s appointments to fix. She’s a television reporter; image is important. “Anything but that.”

“Aha!” cries Megamind, apparently misinterpreting her annoyance as fear. “Good work, Minion,” he adds in an undertone that is more like an overtone. “Yes, the flamethrower! Beg for your life, or you will surely meet a swift and fiery doom!”

Roxanne takes a moment to wonder how this is even her life, before giving in to the inevitable. “Oh, no, spare me,” she says loudly and without expression. “Please, don’t activate the flamethrower. I’ll do anything. Won’t somebody please come to my rescue right now? This madman is terrorising me so.”

“Perfect!” Megamind takes his finger off a big, black button she hadn’t noticed he was pressing down. “Thanks to the system of receivers and transmitters which I have installed in this lair and throughout the city, the whole of Metrocity will have heard your anguished cries! Metro Man cannot possibly ignore your distress!”

“ **Augh**!” Roxanne sags forward in her bindings. “The whole **city**? Megamind, the man has super hearing, he doesn’t-” She breaks off, seeing that Megamind isn’t listening, too busy scurrying back and forth and readying whatever new trap he’s set for Metro Man. “Next time we do this, remind me to teach you the word “overkill”,” Roxanne says, again to no response. She looks up at the ceiling. “I should really, really get some kind of compensation for this.”

A few seconds later, Metro Man smashes into the lair, flies over the alligator pool and incinerates her bonds with one blast of his laser-vision. He easily fights off what looks to be a swarm of flying metal clamps that latch onto his arms and legs, trying and failing to weigh him down. A couple of them fall into the alligator pool as he shakes them off.

“I mean it about the Animal Welfare Hotline, Megamind!” Roxanne calls as she is flown away through the newly-created skylight.

*

Kidnapping Number Thirty-Three takes place three weeks later. In that time, Roxanne has managed to reschedule and conduct the interview that Megamind interrupted with Kidnapping Thirty-Two, smooth over some of the damage done to her professional image by the kidnapping and subsequent broadcasting of her unethusiastic cries for help throughout the city (one of the things she does to counteract it is to appear on a talk show, where she spends most of the running time being bombarded with questions about Metro Man’s love life, which is the complete opposite of professional, but predictably par for the course) and among other things, cover the dissolution of a smuggling ring which has been stealing circuit boards and wiring from the city’s machinery and selling them off to some outlet store in Romania.

Roxanne doesn’t scream this time as the bag is pulled from her head, but Megamind is too preoccupied to notice. “Minion!” he says grandly from where he is once again reclining in his supervillain desk chair. “Present ‘The Card’!”

With a flourish, Minion drops a small rectangle of stock card into her lap, seeing as how her hands are tied behind her back as usual. Roxanne doesn’t immediately register the action.

“Three weeks? Is that all it took you to break out of jail? I am definitely going to spearhead an exposé on our city’s prison security. Super-genius or not, this should _not_ keep happening.” Then she looks down at the card for the first time. “What is this meant to be?”

The card is the same light blue as Megamind’s skin. Across the top, in spiky black capitals (Roxanne wouldn’t be surprised if Minion downloaded a font called “Evil Genius” or something to use for the lettering) it reads: **FREQUENT KIDNAPPING CARD**. Underneath are ten circles laid out in two rows of five; the last is a smiley face.

“Frequent… kidnapping… card?” Roxanne’s voice shakes on the last syllable as she struggles not to burst out laughing.

“Your compensation!” says Megamind. “Minion has advised me that it is commonplace to compensate regular customers of a particular service with a loyalty card, to be completed with stamps. You are my most loyal customer, therefore you receive a card.” He looks incredibly pleased with himself.

Roxanne looks between his satisfied expression and Minion’s eager smile and is lost for words. She doesn’t even know where to begin on this one – by disabusing Megamind of the notion that she is his ‘customer’, or by informing him that just because someone is unable to resist you abducting them on a regular basis and threatening them with bodily harm, it doesn’t make them ‘loyal’. She thinks she might need a degree in psychiatry to unravel the logic behind that thought process.

Rather than do either, she looks down at the card again. “So, what’s my reward?” she asks. “If I collect ten stamps, do you leave me alone forever?” In reality, she knows that Megamind will grasp phonics before that ever happens.

Megamind looks blank, long enough for Roxanne to be certain that there is absolutely no reward coming to her for filling in this card, before his usual look of smug assurance is pasted back into place. “All will be revealed once the stamps fall into place,” he says with an air of pseudo-mystery. “I can only tell you that it will be compensation beyond your wildest dreams!”

She highly doubts that. Then again, Roxanne has never had any wild dreams involving compensation from Megamind for filling a card up with stamps (wait, that sounds dirty, scratch that thought), so maybe he has a point. In any case, as with all things involving Megamind, the easiest way for Roxanne to preserve her sanity is just to play along.

“Well, I can’t wait,” she says with a smile that for some reason makes Megamind become flustered and spin around in the chair, pressing more random buttons on his console. “Can I have the first stamp?”

“Yes, yes, Minion, go ahead and stamp Ms. Ritchi's card,” says Megamind with studied casualness, flicking a hand in the air.

The card is tucked away in Roxanne’s purse and quickly forgotten in the wake of a “Spinning Blade of Doom” (evil patent pending) that gets stuck halfway towards Roxanne’s head because Minion forgot to oil the something-something gear (Roxanne tunes out in the middle of Megamind’s rant and Minion’s upset protests). Metro Man arrives in short order, having followed an apparent paper trail that Megamind left when he relocated his evil lair from the last kidnapping. Roxanne can’t fathom what kind of paperwork Megamind would need to fill out for constructing an evil lair, or how he could ever expect to not get caught out, but she gets to go home early, so whatever.

*

The card slowly fills up. Roxanne thought for sure that she’d forget about the ridiculous concept of a Frequent Kidnapping Card after a few months, but she surprises herself by remembering every time, possibly because it gives her a vindictive satisfaction to interrupt Megamind and Metro Man’s “witty back-and-forth banter” with a request for a stamp, just to remind them that she’s sitting right there and getting really, really bored with the whole ordeal; or maybe because she enjoys teasing Megamind about the non-existent reward, voicing aloud ridiculous suggestions for what she might get when she finally has ten stamps.

The kidnapping after she suggests “evil genius cookies”, Minion actually bakes them a tray of chocolate-chip cookies shaped like brain-bots, and unties Roxanne’s hands so that she can eat them. That one turns out to be more of a tea-party than a kidnapping. Metro Man is even invited to have a few of the cookies after he shows up. Well, she thinks that they actually might have been laced with some kind of poison or drug considering how enthusiastically Megamind thrusts them upon his nemesis and then watches him like a hawk after they’re consumed.

Nothing happens; Metro Man gets up to leave and Megamind dolefully stamps Roxanne’s Frequent Kidnapping Card before she goes, leaving a smear of chocolate on the corner.

*

A few days after Kidnapping Number Forty-One and the ninth stamp on Roxanne's Frequent Kidnapping Card, Roxanne is out at a mall on the far side of the city. She needs to pick up some new suits for work; the ones she has are a little well-worn, and her favourite green skirt got splashed with acid from some kind of elaborate sprinkler system/obstacle course that Megamind rigged up to activate when Metro Man flew in through the window. It didn't go off; Metro Man broke in through the ceiling instead, Minion tripped on the way to activate the 'fail-safe' which turned out to be a dome made out of a chromium and tungsten alloy (the world's hardest and strongest metals, respectively), which fell on top of Megamind, and the acid sprinklers had activated as Metro Man flew her out of the window.

He'd managed to dodge the worst of it, and Roxanne only noticed once she was back at her flat that there was a ragged hole like a bite mark in the hem of her skirt. Damn it, she'd liked that skirt.

So, new suits it is. She's far enough out of the city centre that the most attention she gets is a couple of curious glances and the odd double-take as someone passes by her and then, belatedly, realises who she is. She's perfected a kind of 'yes I know but please don't disturb me while I'm shopping' polite smile, which serves to deflect most of it.

It's been a good shopping session, and Roxanne's arms are laden down with bags, plus four other clothing items on hangers that Roxanne tries to juggle as she fumbles for her coin purse at the checkout. Somehow, she sort of _flicks_ it, and an assortment of coins and cards spill out all across the counter.

“Ugh, _sorry_ ,” she apologises to the young and smiling checkout girl. She manages to sweep most of it back into her bag in one go – she'll leave it loose in there and sort it out once she gets home – and drops a few last coins back into her purse, before holding out the credit card she _meant_ to use to pay for everything.

“Um, you forgot one-” The woman picks up a light blue card from the counter, and then freezes as she reads the writing on top. **FREQUENT KIDNAPPING CARD.** Her eyes go wide, and she looks from the card to Roxanne and back again, recognition dawning on her face.

Roxanne _groans_ inside her head, so hard that she thinks some of the sound might have made it out of her mouth. She forces a brittle smile. “I'll take that-”

“You're Roxanne Ritchi,” the girl says, awestruck. “It's really _you_ , oh my god, I'm _such_ a fan, I thought I recognised you but I didn't really think you'd be here, shopping for clothes, ohmygod, you should have some kind of a discount!”

“Uh-” It takes Roxanne a minute to get herself together. She's never had someone react like this on recognising her before; some people have said some very nice things (and some very uncomplimentary things about Megamind), but she's never had anyone _fangirl_ before. “That's okay, I really shouldn't-”

“No really, it's totally fine, I'll use my staff discount, and I think some of these items are on promotion anyway!”

They definitely aren't; Roxanne knows because she'd checked each of the price tags, and winced at a couple of them, but then rationalised that she was buying them to last. Well, unless there's another acid incident. Still, she lets the girl ring them all up for far, far less than what she should be paying, runs her credit card through the machine, and even signs the store copy of the receipt for her as a keepsake.

As Roxanne is leaving, she looks down at the Frequent Kidnapping Card she's still holding and smiles as she runs her thumb over the smiley face in the tenth circle. _I guess it turns out there_ was _a reward, after all._

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic that I started writing almost two _years_ ago now, in June 2014. I've been meaning to finish it forever, but tonight I just happened to get the itch to write some fic, and I opened up the file and discovered I'd written way more of the story than I had remembered (and also that it was pretty good). After that, it didn't take long to finish it.
> 
> Saying that, I think there was originally a lot more to this story which I unfortunately don't remember. The 'Animal Welfare Hotline' was definitely a setup for some kind of joke or mini-arc, and there was a whole section exploring Roxanne's (non-romantic) feelings towards Metro Man which I wrote in detail in my head, decided not to include, but was planning to write as an out-take. Unfortunately, I didn't make notes on it or anything useful like that. I promise I'll come back and put it in if I remember!
> 
> Before anyone asks, I don't have an idea for how the Frequent Kidnapping 'promotion' was discontinued, but I'm open to suggestions xD


End file.
